Upgrading Commander Precon - Virtue and Valor (Ellivere of the Wild Court)

The Wilds of Eldraine set brought us two new precon Commander decks, a Faeries one and an Enchantment one - which was the one we chose for today's upgrade!

This deck focuses on auras, and comes in the Selesnya color combination, drawing us cards and creating Role tokens, with Ellivere of the Wild Court as the commander!

This deck doesn't have many secrets: it has good enchantments and enchanted creatures, draws several cards and creates more and more value with even more enchantments each time.

This list has great cards for this archetype, which significantly helps us when it's time to choose cards to optimize its game style and strategy a bit more.

Virtue and Valor Decklist

Cards like Ancestral Mask, Angelic Destiny, Bear Umbra and Daybreak Coronet have impressed me because they're already included in this deck, considering they're excellent, and quite popular too, enchantments for this archetype. Utopia Sprawl, Timely Ward and Mantle of the Ancients also fit this bill.

So we can actually extract Virtue and Valor out of this list, we'll change 14 cards. We'll keep Ellivere of the Wild Court as the commander, even though its alternative, Gylwain, Casting Director, is just as efficient. Gylwain will get their own alternative list at the end of this article, so hold on for that.

Cards Removed

This list had 39 lands originally, so we cut down 2 forests and 2 plains so we can have a total number of lands that is more pleasant. We removed creature cards and enchantment cards that are too "basic", freeing up space for other cards that are even better.

Cards like Sylvan Ranger and Realm-Cloaked Giant // Cast Off seem a bit lost in this deck, and simpler or heavier enchantments seem just the same, such as Warbriar Blessing or Pollenbright Wings. Spectral Steel and Careful Cultivation were also too simple for this deck's goal, just like Ox Drover and Liberated Livestock were.

Verdant Embrace can be useful in certain situations, but we needed to remove it to open up space - after all, you need to free up slots for cards that will be more efficient, particularly defensive resources.

Now that we already have free spaces for our new additions, let's talk about those.

New Enchantments and Interaction

I must admit I found it odd that this deck doesn't already have Sythis, Harvest's Hand in its base list because it is a very popular commander for this archetype. It is a very fast and efficient card draw engine for its cost, besides the resilience it offers through life gain.

Wild Growth was added for ramp, working in parallel to other cards that are already in this deck: Utopia Sprawl and Fertile Ground.

Cards like Kenrith's Transformation are very efficient to delay your opponents, particularly in an archetype that doesn't interact with the opponent's creatures through answers. Considering this, we brought more cards with a similar effect: Darksteel Mutation, to disable opponent creatures (particularly commanders), and Song of the Dryads, to make your opponents' life harder with just a single forest.

Considering Ellivere can only give Virtuous Roles to other creatures, we brought a similar card, Ethereal Armor, to enchant them with something that is close to a Virtuous Role: All that Glitters. This is another card that surprised me because it is not in the original list, considering it is very common to see it in enchantment decks.

Finally, we brought more enchantments to close out this section. We have Rancor, to bring some evasion to any creatures that needs it. After all, the Virtuous Role already buffs the creature enough, so nothing is more fair than to guarantee that this buffed damage will go through. It is also useful for you to always have an enchantment in hand, considering Rancor can return to your hand if it is moved from the battlefield to the graveyard.

Lastly, we have Sphere of Safety to give us some safety against more aggressive decks, considering we already have 22 enchantments in this deck, not to mention the enchantment tokens we create. It will gain us some time to deal with Aggro decks.

Removals and Recursion

This deck has just a few target removals, and that is a flaw, somewhat. We can't always count on removing players to remove their problematic permanents, so we brought more options so we can try to defend ourselves.

Parallel to Swords to Plowshares and Generous Gift, we bring Path to Exile and Beast Within, respectively. Even though it doesn't target lands to remove things like Cabal Coffers, Rogue's Passage or Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, we also brought Stroke of Midnight to the upgraded list, considering it is as useful as Generous Gift and Beast Within as a removal.

Danitha, New Benalia's Light was another great addition. Besides having 3 keywords that guarantee it consistency, evasion and sustain respectively, and, therefore, it is an excellent target for auras, it allows us to retrieve auras that were lost in the game.

Kodama of the West Tree is also another excellent target because it gives evasion to all modified creatures - in this case, enchanted creatures - and allows us to ramp a basic land for each modified creature that deals damage. Like so, it removes several lands from this deck and slightly improves the cards you'll draw in the future.

We'll use Collector Ouphe to delay opponents. Nowadays, artifacts are something almost every deck in this format uses, and a considerable amount of them heavily depend on these tools. Even though it locks down our Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, this card causes more issues for other players than it does for us.

Finally, we have Archon of the Wild Rose to buff our enchanted creatures, leaving them with 4/4 base power and also giving them evasion through the Flying ability. It is an excellent creature, but it is important to pay attention to the creatures that will be enchanted with it because creatures like Sun Titan would be downgraded instead of buffed.

This is how the upgraded list turned out! We changed just a few things, but we already guaranteed it more safety, both because we added the necessary answers for the difficult situations that might appear in our way and to improve this deck as a whole, even more so because we removed the cards that aren't that interesting.

After all, using 39 lands a Sylvan Ranger doesn't seem to create any value in a deck of this caliber, considering it can create a good board with several huge creatures, and keep its resources constant through several card draw and card advantage tools.

Alternative List with Gylwain, Casting Director

This list focuses on Gylwain, Casting Director. We have several similar cards, and a few more interesting additions, such as Jaheira, Friend of the Forest to create mana with the Role tokens created by Gylwain, Idyllic Tutor to look for the necessary enchantments, and A Tale for the Ages to buff even more our creatures, for instance.

This Gylwain deck focuses more on extracting value out of your creatures than enchantments, necessarily, and builds on these tools together, which results in a list that is very consistent and fun.

Messing around with precon Commander decks is always a joy, particularly the most recent lists, which have more cards that are indeed necessary for those decks' archetypes, such as the one mentioned in this article previously.

Decks from before didn't have this much support, and offered two or even three different strategies in a single deck, which made it a bit confusing. I'm glad that today this is no longer the case for the decks that are released, even more so considering Virtue and Valor, which has already become consistent and strong with just a few changes.

Did you like this list? Do you prefer Gylwain in the command zone? Do you have any suggestions? Leave them in the comment section!